Daniel Ricciardo #3
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:37.238, pos. 9th, 25 laps
Sprint Qualifying – Best lap: (SQ1) 1:37.321, (SQ2) 1:36.553, pos. 14th
“It’s one of those days where P14 is not an obvious result to get excited about, but personally, I think it was a much better day because we hit the ground running this morning and were in the top 10. At the same time, I knew that some cars used only one set of tyres. We knew getting into Q3 would have been tough, but the feeling on track was definitely a bit better, so some encouragement by that. It’s close, not somewhere where we’re going to be particularly over the moon, but on our personal little path that we’re on, it was a positive day. Looking at tomorrow, the Sprint is certainly another chance to come through the field and have a little bit of a battle. It’s a circuit where you can overtake because there are some good opportunities. So yes, two chances for racing this weekend and I’m really looking forward to that.”
Yuki Tsunoda #22
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:38.006, pos. 12th, 27 laps
Sprint Qualifying – Best lap: (SQ1) 1:37.892, pos. 19th
“I struggled with the balance and grip in general from FP1. Even for Sprint Qualifying, we tried different things, but I couldn’t put it all together. Not sure what’s happening there but it definitely was not easy today. It’s not because of the weather and the general track conditions, I just could not achieve more. I haven’t struggled this much so far. It’s strange, but there are still sessions to go, so we’ll continue collecting the data. Qualifying tomorrow is very important so hopefully, we can find something until then, so let’s see how it goes.”
Alan Permane (Racing Director)
“Not a great day for us obviously, and certainly not what we’ve become accustomed to qualifying this car. It was apparent from the first session this morning that we were struggling a little bit for speed. We’ll do the Sprint tomorrow and then obviously we’ve got a chance to change the cars. There’ll be a lot of work going on tonight with the engineers here and back in Italy and the UK because we have an opportunity to adjust the setup for the qualifying session on Saturday afternoon.”
